Last week, Coldwell Banker Warburg hosted its brokers and guests at Barlume, a newly opened New York City restaurant, where they could sip on a signature cocktail, enjoy some food, and dance to music curated by a DJ. About 150 people attended the soirée, making it the largest party the company has held since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Kevelyn Guzman, regional vice president at Coldwell Banker Warburg.

“People want to connect with others. They want more parties,” Guzman said. “They want more networking opportunities. People have been asking us for that.”

This year, 64% of companies planned to have in-person holiday celebrations, matching the amount in 2023, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and coaching firm. That’s up from 57% in 2022 and 27% in 2021. However, it is still short of 75% of the companies that held parties in 2019.

While the percentage of companies hosting holiday events remains the same, some affairs may be less festive.

Keep reading here.—TA

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Xan Daniels joined Alight more than 20 years ago, when it was the benefits outsourcing unit of Aon Hewitt, which was sold to Blackstone and launched as Alight in 2017. While she worked in the company’s product development and testing, she gradually took on more DE&I leadership responsibilities for the organization. She led Alight’s Black ERG for years and in 2017 was appointed co-leader of its executive inclusion council, before stepping into her current role as VP of inclusion and diversity in 2020.

Like many DE&I leaders, Daniels is contemplating this precarious time for diversity and inclusion work: Companies like Walmart and Ford have walked back DE&I programming amid conservative activist pressure, and the incoming Trump administration could create more legal headaches. For DE&I practitioners, now is the time to reevaluate the strategies they are using to achieve diversity and inclusion commitments, and ensure that they are fair and also not perceived negatively, she said.

One of her biggest priorities right now is creating DE&I structures that can persist through said pendulum swings—like, for example, implementing technologies and systems that broaden talent pipelines for certain roles and ensure consistency and equity with interview processes, without having to rely solely on training workers to do that.

Keep reading here.—PM

From afar, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about Workleap’s IT department, which supports roughly 450 employees each day. However, some may raise eyebrows upon learning that the team of roughly eight employees doesn’t report to an IT manager, but is instead supervised by another unsung hero department: HR.

Since August, Workleap’s IT team has reported to Cyril Boisard, Workleap’s director of people, a move he told IT Brew has been in the works for a long time and one that he made after seeing many “parallels” between HR and IT in how they support the “experience of the user.”

“It was making a lot of sense to add it to the HR because [in] HR, we define policy,” Boisard said. “We talk with users and [our] primary focus is the experience of the employee. But that’s also what we want to be the focus of IT.”

Keep reading on IT Brew.—BM

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